Hello viewers, it’s me, again. But don’t worry I won’t bore you much. Cause today I’ll be talking about something that I love, anime.
Introduction: Anime is a genre of Japanese animation; it’s an absolutely huge industry and it’s growing larger to this day. Obviously, most anime if not all anime is beautiful with some shining above others, but how does anime even get created? Like who draws it, and how do they colour it? It seems like a pretty tough job, but don’t worry I’ll explain everything. The process of animating an anime is definitely a long process. It is one of the harder if not the hardest forms of animation in the world, simply put Japanese animators have a lot of talent. Just comparing American cartoons to anime lets you know what I’m talking about.
Pre-production: The very beginning of the animation process starts with everything but the actual animating part. The anime production company will put up money for the initial animating process. They’ll also take care of the costs that come from airing the show and distributing it to other countries. The actual animation studio will do the animating obviously along with paying staff and some other requirements beforehand. The studio and producers will assemble their team and get to work. Teams in anime typically consist of full-time employees or freelance animators and a few full-time employees.
Storyboarding: You must have heard of storyboarding; this is usually the first step in creating an anime. The director and other people who specialize in storyboarding will put it all together and scriptwriters will create the script. More times than not the studio will start animating way before the entire storyboard is done for a set episode, just because the animation is hard and time consuming. There will be many rough sketches and other drawings before the animation is finalized that directors and other specialists will look over. They’ll decide how the camera moves through a given scene and where the characters need to be positioned.
Animation: Once that’s all said and done key animators will start drawing the characters with other younger animators filling in the gaps between keys by drawing the movement. Basically, a key animation is the drawing that sits on screen which is an important one because we take a lot of time looking at this. The newer animators draw the movement because we see these frames for a lot less time so the quality doesn’t really matter as much. The whole animating process is definitely the longest out of everything that goes into creating an anime. For smaller studios or for studios with newer animators they see many nights where employees sleep over in the office itself. Animating is ridiculously hard, so if you watch a beautiful anime, just remember how hard the animators worked on it.
Colour: After the drawings are finalized and revised the colour artists from a studios’ colouring team digitalize colour and clean up the animation. The process of colouring frames proves to be a difficult task much like animating the actual anime they fill in the blacks, then the skin, clothes, hair, eyes, then shade the whole character, and this process is repeated a lot.
Effects and Voice-acting: Once everything’s animated and coloured, an effects team will take hold of the anime and little things that make a lot of difference in the end, like the shining of a sword or smoke on a cigar. The voice actors then do their work. Some anime and anime movies can take years to make just depending on what the anime is and the requirements for animation quality. Reading this now you have a basic understanding of the animation process in anime.
I feel all the efforts that the mangaka (manga writer) puts into the original manga and all the efforts that the studios put in to bring it to life in anime should be appreciated by everyone. Anime expresses all kinds of emotions and it is all possible due to the mixed efforts of the writers, animators and the voice actors. This has given rise to anime production studios like MAPPA, WIT, Madhouse, Ufotable, Bones, etc. making amazing anime like Jujutsu Kaisen, Naruto, Attack on Titan, Hunter x Hunter, One Punch Man, My Hero Academia, One Piece, Dragon Ball Z, etc. and I hope you get to watch great anime like these sometime in your lifetime.
Hope you had a great time reading this article and see you in the next article of Pixels In Motion!
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